Success Quote by Peter Lynch

The punchline works because it borrows the familiar old gag about economists being “laid end to end” and tweaks it just enough to sound like a gentleman’s insult. “It wouldn’t be a bad thing” is almost comically polite, the verbal equivalent of a banker smiling while he closes the window. Lynch doesn’t need to call economists useless; he just implies the world wouldn’t miss their upright presence.

As a legendary stock-picker, Lynch is speaking from a profession that lives and dies on messy reality: earnings surprises, human overreaction, corporate grit, and the stubborn fact that markets can stay irrational longer than a model can stay convincing. The subtext is a shot at the economist’s posture of authority. Economists often arrive with grand narratives and calibrated confidence, then revise the story after the data changes. Investors like Lynch are paid to act before the story is socially agreed upon. That difference in incentives fuels the joke.

It also lands because “economist” here isn’t a person; it’s a cultural role: the credentialed forecaster who can explain everything except what happens next. In late-20th-century finance, especially after episodes of inflation, crashes, and policy whiplash, distrust of expert prediction became a kind of folk wisdom. Lynch’s line turns that skepticism into a one-liner: not anti-intellectual so much as anti-pretense, a reminder that markets punish certainty more reliably than they reward it.